Temporarily Embarrassed Sex Criminals
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: almost every man on earth has more in common with Jeffrey Epstein's victims than he does with any of the guests.
Just sit with that sentence for a second. Hold it up to the light, check it for flaws, and while you do- consider how quickly violent misogyny has become an organising political force. Consider how the far right recruits the alienated with a promise of sexual vengeance. Consider how the sexual resentment of modern patriarchy justifies itself on the basis that everyone else is a pervert- the cauterised, self-loathing sexuality of the neo-fascist manosphere excuses its own apparently natural, normal, farm-fresh, homegrown sexist violence- unlike that degenerate trans cabal, those predatory immigrants, those deviants and pedophiles spreading their woke mind virus, corrupting the young. In fact, it turns out that for many decades, some of the most powerful anti-woke insiders were part of a boys club that required members to normalise child-rape. It seems to have been a sick sort of mandatory moral hazing. The only surprising thing is that there seem to be actual consequences. All over the world, important men retiring from public life to spend more time helping the police with their enquiries. Except in nations where thugs and creeps and simply run too much of the government right now.
The Epstein Files are shocking, but not surprising. I’ve spent far too long this winter doomscrolling the receipts, and it’s a catalogue of complicity and corruption built on the bodies and broken lives of girls. Thousands of girls. Powerless, vulnerable girls groomed for exploitation to glue wealthy men more securely into their a network of guilt and privilege. The disgusting spectacle of Epstein, a convicted sex criminal, chatting with his bros about how to handle the fallout from Metoo. The assumption that the normal rules of human decency simply do not a should not apply to them, and their commitment to making sure his remains the case.
Sex itself is only a small part of the fun for these sad losers. The fun is getting away with it. Impunity as its own sick thrill - the ultimate signal of insider status.
It's ugly and it’s embarrassing. Most of us respected at least one or two of the public figures on that list.
Noam Chomsky, who is known for coining the phrase the manufacture of consent. He is also known for being a twinkly old man who always wears fantastic sweaters. Years ago, my mum and sisters and I went to hear him speak, and his sweater was memorably adorable.
Apparently Epstein sent Chomsky several sweaters.
I can’t stop thinking about it, and I refuse to normalise it. The sheer state of these gilded thugs and nerd kings wetting themselves with excitement as they wink at one another over Jeffrey's girls. As they bat their eyelids for an invite to sex crime island. As they conspire awkwardly to shut women scientists out of prestigious projects and agree with Jeffrey that there’s never been a woman genius. Not one.
What larks! What naughty fellows we are! That sad spasms of sycophancy, the pathetic glee at their own daring. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, bring your girls. Reassuring themselves that this is what all men would do if they were only rich and brilliant like them.
Enough money and power to solve the world's problems and they choose to solve the apparently primal injustice of having to pretend women are people.
What I find most pernicious is the notion that this sort of repulsive behaviour makes all men brothers. I’m watching men in my own networks talking about the Epstein Files and feeling disgusted with themselves- as if their masculinity makes them somehow complicit. As if they too, but for an accident of wealth, might find themselves frolicing with underage sex slaves on a private jet, as if there is an untameable animal inside every man, an animal that is fundamentally dangerous and fundamentally blameless. He can’t help himself. He’s hungry and scared. It’s in his nature. Let’s just get a girl in to scrub the blood off the sectional.
This is the logic of modern patriarchy. And it’s wrong.
It’s morally disgusting, but it is also simply, factually wrong. Just as every exhausted worker in late capitalism is as temporarily embarrassed millionaire, every man living under patriarchy is invited to imagine himself as a temporarily embarrassed sex criminal. This is how you get hundreds of millions of men to forget which side they’re on.
Patriarchy is a political technology. It is designed to persuade men that their interests lie with a small elite rather than with the other half of the human race.
You can’t possibly understand the eight-billion-soul strong scream room of modern politics without naming patriarchy. Conveniently, a lot of men and boys are triggered to the point of meltdown by mere mention of the word. Many are so afraid of being unfairly villainised that they refuse to even try to understand what patriarchy actually means.
Recent efforts to reclaim the word for the red pilled masses are excruciating for the exact same reason: because accurately describing patriarchy means admitting that most men aren’t patriarchs and never will be. A mumbling white boy with ratty dreadlocks on TikTok spaffing out dire reggae dirges about the holiness of patriarchy by a rock in bumblefuck nowhere was never supposed to be one of the system’s winners. If he was, he would have more clean shirts.
Patriarchy does not mean the rule of men.
It does not mean all men and boys in charge of all women and girls, forever. It doesn’t even imply a binary system. Patriarchy means the rule of fathers.
Of patriarchs. Of a small number of rich old men with a monopoly on violence, in charge of absolutely everyone else.
Patriarchy is a political technology. It is designed to persuade men that their interests lie with a small elite rather than with the other half of the human race.
The darker and more frightening the future gets, the more ordinary men are marooned in poverty, insecurity and shame, the easier it is to persuade them that it’s all feminism’s fault. That those sick bitches with their selfish insistence on personal liberty are the ones who stripped you of wealth and status. Wealth and status demand women’s sexual submission. After all, when you’re a star, they let you do it. And who doesn’t want to be a star?
There’s an organizing principle here that may of us are missing. A story that underwrites a lot of modern misogyny. The story claims that the real power differential in society, the one that actually matters, is women’s sexual power over men.
Women’s sexual power over men is the only power men are permitted to chafe at. The power, specifically, to withhold sex and everything that is supposed to come with it: pleasure, care, intimacy, validation, belonging, status, self-respect. Sex - specifically straight, penetrative sex and the social capital to command it - is supposed to replace everything late capitalism strips from you if you weren’t born rich. Everything that you are, in fact, entitled to. Entitlement and frustration are utterly reasonable things to feel. Patriarchy takes care to translate that feeling into the key of misogyny.
That’s how women’s agency becomes the common enemy. The modern far right tells its frightened recruits that women and girls are both the enemy and the object; the unfairly enclosed territory to be retaken as common ground. Men are invited to a counter-insurgency that cuts conveniently across class. The sort of war in which there are only ever winners and losers, persecutors and victims.
